Caption: Layers of harvested hay. This hay is being used on the shores of the Aral Sea to feed livestock in an area with poor grazing and poor agricultural soils. The Aral Sea, an inland sea that was once one of the largest in the world, is in the Central Asian nations of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. It used to have a thriving fishing industry, but in the 1930s the Soviet Union dug canals that diverted the sea's major rivers to irrigate cotton fields. From the 1960s, the sea started to shrink, and by 2004 some 75 percent of the sea's area had been lost. The remaining water has tripled in salinity and is heavily contaminated by toxins, heavy metals and agricultural chemicals.